America's Korean Adoptees, Part 4: Return To The Motherland

Mark, a 50-year-old Korean
adoptee from Chicago, has an impressive display of facial hair: a
full moustache and beard, something you don’t see that often on
Korean men. (My brother, who, like me, is a Korean adoptee, has
tried this before and gotten a woefully undergrown result.) When he
was preparing for his first trip back to South Korea, Mark
struggled with what to do about his facial hair. In homogenous
Korean society, he knew that the beard would be “a big deal.”
Should he make life easier and shave it, or stay true to himself
and keep it? It was, as it turned out, a profound decision, one
that would set the tone for his entire relationship with his birth
country. So what did he do?

“I decided to keep my facial hair,” he said, “even though I knew
it would be weird.” The result was much as he expected: “They
stared at me constantly,” he said. “Everyone assumed I was
Japanese.”

Not every adoptee chooses to return to his birth country for a
visit, but such trips have become increasingly common in recent
years. For many it’s an undeniable rite of passage—one that’s often
difficult. Kathleen, a 24-year-old adoptee from upstate New York,
described her trip back to Korea as “not a vacation. It feels like
work.” Mark said, “It’s an intense experience” no matter how
prepared you think you are. The first trip back for an adoptee is
so much more than taking an east Asian sabbatical: it’s a point of
no return. The decision to brave the journey is a choice to
consciously confront the reality of your dual existence: an
acknowledgment that despite your thoroughly American upbringing,
this completely different world is somehow still tied to you.

“I came from this place. I spent the first six months of my life
in this country, with these people, in these hospitals, eating this
food,” Kathleen said of the realization she had during her trip.
Eleana Kim, an aassistant professor of anthropology at the
University of Rochester and author of Adopted Territory:
Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging,
said that as an adoptee back in Korea for the first time, you often
wonder “whether or not the people you’re passing on the street
could be your relatives.” It can be, she said, “really
destabilizing” to experience such a shock to “a life and an
identity that was [previously] not questioned.”

At its best, the trip can help an adoptee piece together parts
of a cultural identity that they may have felt was missing. As
Caroline, a 24-year-old adoptee who teaches English in Korea, wrote
me, it can fill in “a little bit of the hole that I think a lot of
adoptees have.” Soo, who is also 24, remembers feeling “a little
more mature” after her first trip back. Taken when she was ten
years old, the trip gave her “a better understanding of where I
came from.”

Paul Kim, who directs programs in Korea, Mongolia and Nepal for
the adoption agency Holt International, explained to me that
gaining more of an understanding of their birth country is an
empowering experience that leads many adoptees to gain “a sense of
understanding and pride, and a greater sense of self.” Holt
operates Motherland Tours to Korea for adoptees, and Mr. Kim said
that adoptees often contact Holt afterwards to ask about other
opportunities to return to Korea.

Disconnection And Disillusionment
Cultural misunderstandings are a part of travel, but when you’re an
adoptee in your birth country these issues are amplified. Take
language. One of the first Korean phrases Heather, an adoptee from
Baltimore, learned before her visit was “I don’t speak Korean.”
Nobody believed her. And Caroline said that Koreans actually seemed
to disapprove of her inability to speak the language.

Then there’s the sensation, sometimes as disconcerting as it is
heady, of finding oneself a part of the majority. Ms. Kim described
the process as having two stages: first, the relief at finally
blending in, followed by the realization that “I can’t communicate
with them. As soon as I open my mouth, they know I’m not one of
them.”

The biggest source of disconnection comes from the responses of
Koreans when they realize they’re talking to an adoptee. Envy is
one facet: according to Ms. Kim, many Koreans envy adoptees because
they were able to get on the “fast track to assimilation.” (Heather
was told by some Koreans during her stay that she “was so lucky
that I was adopted because my English was perfect.”)

Pity is also a common response. Steve, an adoptee from
Nashville, said that while he didn’t feel shamed for his ignorance
of the language and culture during his visit, “bringing up the
adopted thing more often triggers a kind of pity response, which is
awful in its own way.” Heather, who “actually had people apologize”
to her for her adoption, knew adoptees who had gotten free meals or
gifts from Koreans, perhaps because, she hypothesized, Korean
cultural pride leads to collectivist Korean guilt. In fact, she
rarely divulged her adoptee status because she “didn’t want them to
feel sorry for me. I would occasionally get the pity face after I
said that. And I hate that shit.”

Then there are the problems of cultural difference. Mark, my
new, impressively bearded friend, found himself disillusioned by
what he deemed a “really, really, really conformist” Korean
culture. The facial hair, his Western appearance, the fact that he
is gay, and his age—in his 40s for all three of his trips to Korea,
well past the time he likely would have been married as a cultural
Korean—all led him to being treated as an “outsider.” “I felt so
alienated by Korea each time,” he said. “There is no space in South
Korean culture for being different.” He described Koreans as
determinedly uniform, both aesthetically—including the omnipresent
double-eyelid surgery for women—and socially, an environment that
makes it near impossible for adoptees to, as he put it, “get in.”
He once met a Scandinavian adoptee who had done everything to fully
assimilate in Korean culture, but Mark insists that the jig will be
up when she gets a boyfriend and meets his family. “The family will
reject her like that, because she’s an adoptee,” he said. He was
also disappointed by what he perceived to be an intolerant and
restrictive culture. “In Korea,” he told me, “[saying] ‘people will
talk’ is like [saying] you boil babies and eat them for
breakfast.”

Kathleen, who traveled with Mark on a 2006 tour with the Korean
American Adoptee Adoptive Family Network (KAAN), met similar
problems. Korean women are very thin, she told me, and at a healthy
but non-size-two weight, she was subjected to a lot of unwanted
attention. The worst moment was when an elderly man told her she
needed to exercise during a tour of her adoption agency. “It was so
incredibly offensive, and it was so hurtful,” she said, that she’s
not sure when she wants to return to Korea, if at all.

Idealizing your birth country is a dangerous proposition for an
adoptee, and coming up against its reality can lead to some painful
revelations and disappointments. It’s hurtful to feel rejected by
the hallowed country of your birth for simply being … well, you.
“The real problem,” Steve said, “is when a place has symbolic
value, and is nothing but a myth. When you idealize something so
much without ever seeing it or experiencing it, that can be very
dangerous.” When I confided that one of the factors preventing me
from seriously contemplating visiting Korea was my fear that I just
won’t like my own birth country, a somewhat traumatic idea
for me, he said, “That would be healthy! I think I realized I could
never live there. And that’s a good thing. That’s a kind of
closure.” Though he wants to go back, he realized that he “can’t go
back there and reclaim something that isn’t there to be reclaimed.
And I had to go there to realize it wasn’t there.”

As for returning to Korea, Heather told me she “would go [back]
in a heartbeat.” “It was seriously one of the best decisions I’ve
ever made,” she said. But not all adoptees connect as strongly, or
even at all, with their birth country: To Kathleen, Korea was “a
huge, unwelcoming, foreign place” that effectively alienated her.
While Kathleen and Mark recommend that every adoptee take the trip
back to Korea, neither of them really wishes to return.

Meeting Your Birth Mother
Another major element often thrown into these already turbulent
trips is the birth family search. This is a “huge question for many
adoptees,” Mark told me. “Imagine the intensity, and then cube it.”
It’s a major decision and, as Mr. Kim said, “a door that, once
opened, you can’t close again.” How far are you willing to go? This
isn’t just some long-lost or estranged relative: this is the
woman who gave birth to you, who then, for whatever reason,
gave you up for adoption. What would your life have been like with
her if you’d never left? Who would you have become?

Understandably, plenty of adoptees decide they’re not ready.
Mark is among them. “It might be really traumatic, you know?” he
said. “People don’t just give up their babies for no reason.” Soo
also decided against a birth family search and doesn’t regret it.
Only ten when she made the trip, “I wouldn’t have fully grasped the
gravity of making that choice.”

For Kathleen, her reunion with her birth mother was not quite
the warm and happy meeting she had imagined. She had friends on the
tour who had wonderful reunions with their birth mothers, and she
found herself disappointed by the reality of her own encounter. Her
mother was a no-show for their first scheduled meeting, and when
they finally did meet up, “she was kind of a diva,” Kathleen said.
And though presents weren’t expected, she had presented her birth
mother with a gift and not received one in return. Basically,
Kathleen said, “I didn’t particularly like her.”

But the door had been opened. Once Kathleen returned to the
United States her birth mother started calling. Even though they
couldn’t communicate because of the language barrier, she called
every day for two weeks. Her family finally had to take the phone
off the hook.

When Heather’s adoption agency contacted her while she was in
Korea to say they had located her birth mother, she was stunned. “I
couldn’t believe it,” she said. “I had honestly never expected to
find her.” When they finally met at her adoption agency, “it was
emotional. There was just so much sobbing. I had no idea what to
expect, but it was a really positive experience.” Heather’s
adoptive parents were even able to visit, meeting with her birth
family for an emotional meal. The only thing that makes Heather sad
is that her birth mother feels guilty about giving her up; her
birth mother remarried, but, having given up Heather and her
sister, she felt she “didn’t deserve any more” children. Heather
told me that “there is certainly a sense of closure” now that she’s
reunited with her birth mother, but that it also had raised a host
of other questions. Before her birth mother had been an abstract
concept. Now she has a real-life form.

Steve has never tried to meet his birth mother, and “basically
has nothing to go on.” Do you wish you could? I asked. “Of course.
In a way it’s easier to compartmentalize, because it’s a dead end.
But yes, part of me will always wonder. How could you not?”

All Aboard The Orphan Bus
“Motherland tours.” The name sounds antiquated, even creepy,
conjuring images of a state-sponsored journey through a falsely
idyllic Korea, with scenes engineered to welcome long lost sons and
daughters back into the fold. Yet while this is not an
entirely false perception, the consensus among the adoptees
I talked to was that if you want to travel back to Korea, a
motherland tour is one of the best ways to do it.

A motherland tour typically consists of a large group of
adoptees, with or without their families, traveling to Korea
accompanied by staff and guides. It’s a package tour, and the
itinerary usually includes visits to important sites and places of
interests, with stops at adoption agencies and the possibility of a
birth family search.

Tons of organizations run them, both in the United States and
Korea, although the tours haven’t been around that long. Adoptees
didn’t start going back to Korea in significant numbers until the
early ’90s. Strangely, one reason for the increase in interest was
a series of negative stories in the media scrutinizing the
country’s adoption practices. During the 1988 Olympics in Seoul,
NBC’s Bryant Gumbel reported on Korea’s baby “exportation”
industry, claiming that the country’s babies were also its primary
export commodity. The ethical questions surrounding Korean adoption
received more attention with The Progressive’s
unapologetically titled essay “Babies
for sale. South Koreans make them, Americans buy them,” and a
New York Times article published shortly thereafter,
which characterized adoption in Korea as a well-run business—and a
national source of shame for Korea. But even negative press brings
heightened awareness. The first motherland tours catered mostly to
adult adoptees, but over time, “tourism has evolved in response to
customer demand, as it were,” said Ms. Kim. Nowadays, adoptees’
families, wanting to share the experience of a birth country visit
with their children, are often the ones initiating the trips.

“It’s a very safe way to introduce adoptees who had never been
to Korea to the place,” Ms. Kim said to me. She means “safe” in
more than one sense. The tours provide logistical guidance,
support, translation services and the comfort of traveling in
numbers—all immensely valuable to anyone visiting a new country for
the first time. But there’s another component as well. As Soo said
to me, “These trips have the potential to get heavy,” and many
adoptees value the emotional support found on a group tour. It
means they’re not alone on the intense emotional rollercoaster that
often marks the experience. “I purposefully went alone the first
time,” Mark told me. “I wanted to see what it would be like. After
I went, I was like, okay, I don’t need to go alone again.”

Of course, there are downsides. “The recurring complaint has
been the sense of infantilizing and paternalism,” Ms. Kim said. On
the first such tour that Ms. Kim (who is not an adoptee)
accompanied, the group traveled on a bus with a huge banner
identifying it as a being full of adoptees; the banner elicited so
many responses of pity from onlookers that the group took to
calling it the “orphan bus.” Mark told me a strikingly similar
story of an adoptee friend on a tour whose bus bore a banner
proclaiming it to be a bus of “Korean orphans.” Motherland tours
have also been criticized “for being kind of unrealistic,” Ms. Kim
added, and for “presenting a very limited view” of Korea.

Still, being a “bubble” has definite benefits. “One of the main
things about these tours for adoptees,” Ms. Kim said, “is that the
bubble [has] the positive effect of helping adoptees really bond
with each other and develop these intimate exchanges about what it
means to be adopted. In a way, the tour provides the space for that
to happen.”

When adoptees return to their birth country, the collision of
their two worlds can be confusing, chaotic, emotional, even
traumatic. Sometimes they find closure, or connections, or lasting
relationships. Or they very well may find that there’s nothing left
in Korea for them to reclaim at all. But as Steve told me, “there’s
something very powerful about just touching the ground you were
born on.”